People of African Descent in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

People of African descent shaped early modern Europe, here encompassing the 15th to 18th centuries, in many ways. They traveled, moved, or were trafficked to the European continent, voluntarily or by force, temporarily or for the rest of their lives. Yet the great majority of Africans arrived in Europe as captives or slaves. Enslavement practices that originated in ancient and medieval times gained momentum during the era when peoples living in the Mediterranean basin practiced reciprocal enslavement, only to continue after the advent of the transatlantic slave trade. This article takes into consideration people from North Africa who were part of the Mediterranean slavery system as well as sub-Saharan Africans who were affected by the transatlantic slave trade and are referred to in some research literatures as “black Africans.” However, as the early modern term “moor” was used indiscriminately by contemporaries to refer to dark-skinned people from a wide variety of geographical locations, it is not always possible to differentiate between people from the African continent (North and South), the Ottoman Empire (which extended from Central Asia and the eastern Mediterranean to North Africa), or, for instance, the Indian subcontinent. Africans not only arrived as captives or slaves but also as merchants, diplomats, scholars, and students. They came as the partners or children of marital, but more often informal, relationships between Europeans and Africans in the colonies. Whereas it is often difficult to reconstruct to what extent these relationships were characterized by love, force, or pragmatism, the composition of Euro-African families in Europe suggests African agency as much as the intellectual, artistic, and military career trajectories of people of African descent. By contrast, research on the contribution of people of African descent to early modern European culture is only in its beginning stages and is aggravated by a dearth of sources as well as Eurocentric perspectives. The research in different European countries differs enormously, depending on the country’s proximity to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic basin, its involvement in colonial projects and subsequent need for manpower, and public awareness of the topic. Whereas research on the Mediterranean slave trade as well as the repercussions of the transatlantic slave trade on western European colonial powers like France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain partly goes back to the 1950s, Scandinavia, the German territories, and the Central European “hinterlands” have attracted more attention only recently.